The prince blushed crimson.
"Very well, then. We're pawns. The cheapest whore has more freedom than I've had. But everything's in flux now. Even Mother Bey is affected. She says not to be alone tonight; I don't think she can absorb your stormgod into herself as She has done with all our heroes and man-gods. I could choose to be with a priest or one of the Burek but I've chosen to be with you."
She stripped the loose tunic back from the prince's shoulders and pulled him toward her. He resisted, fumbling with the accursed buckles on his sandals, then committed himself to the changes she promised.
It was night at last, with the darker emotions of the mortal spirit obscuring the heavens as surely as the smoke and the eternal fog. Ischade extinguished her candles and gathered her dark robes around her. She had planned and deliberated as she had seldom done, choosing decision over reaction despite its risks and unfamiliarity.
She sealed the White Foal house with a delicate touch; if she failed, the dawn would find nothing more than rotting boards rising from the overgrown marshes. The black roses opened as she passed them, giving her their arcane beauty for what might be the last time. With a caress she savored their death-sweet perfume and sent them back where she had found them.
Across the bridge, deep within the better part of town, the bay horse consumed the last of the ward-fire, leaving the Peres house naked to whatever moved in the darkness. Ischade clung to the shadows with more than her usual caution; she was not immune to mortal forms of death and there were others migrating instinctively to the house now that its defenses had vanished. Crouched in a doorway, she lit a single candle and studied the wisps of magic rising through the ruins of Roxane's wards.
At her unspoken command the front door faded from its hinges. Ischade crept through, bristling with alertness and prepared to utilize every trick in her carefully prepared arsenal. There was nothing to challenge or greet her as she glided along the hallway, vanishing amid her numerous possessions.
She found the trail Straton's blood had made and followed it through to the kitchen. Stilcho's heroism had borne fruit; but Straton's safety was not her only goal. Haught was here; the Nisi witch was here and she would not leave until she had consigned both to hell and beyond.
Continuing her search, Ischade swept from room to room to the waist-thick beams of the cluttered attic where her search had to end. Haught crouched outside the sphere, enraptured by the nether-world dazzle of the globe, his eyes as wide and glazed as any Beysib's. Shiey's cleaver lay in a twisted lump at his feet. Tasfalen sang with a dead man's voice, dragging one leg stiffly as he shambled around the perimeter of the globe's light.
Tasfalen?
Ischade did not immediately comprehend the changes which had overtaken Tasfalen Lancothis. Had Haught somehow kept the globe? Had she simply imagined Roxane's taint on the corroded wards? Surely Tasfalen's flawed resurrection had been her one-time apprentice's work; Roxane's efforts were brutal but never so crude. Concealed by shadow and the skein of magic she had spun, the necromant dared briefly to listen to the globe's song until she could piece the truth together.
She noted, even as Haught had noted, the carelessness which marked the Nisi witch's failure to protect her mortal shell and recognized the same mystic illness from which she herself had only just recovered. For a fleeting moment Ischade felt a sense of pity that one so powerful should be conquered by an accumulation of minute errors. Then she set about weaving a gossamer web to ground the globe's radiant energy in her focal possessions as fast as Roxane/Tasfalen could create it.
The faster the globe whirled, the stronger Ischade's binding threads became, until the whole house rattled and dust fell in flakes from the ancient roofbeams-and still the Nisi witch sang her curses into the artifact. The necromancer played out the last strand and stood up in the wash of blue light.
Tasfalen's dead eye gave no indication of recognition; Rox-ane was too deeply enmeshed in her spell-casting to spare the energy for simple words. A shriek of rage emanated from the globe itself as the Nisi witch launched her attack-a shriek that shattered abruptly as the power surged into Ischade's handiwork and made the web brilliantly visible. Curls of smoke twisted up from the weaker foci, but the web held. Ischade began to laugh, savoring her counterpart's growing terror.
Roxane flailed helplessly with Tasfalen's rigor-stricken arms, struggling to free herself from the power gnawing at her soul.
"The wards!" Roxane's disembodied voice howled above the globe's whine. "No wards! He comes for me!"
The Globe of Power spun faster, first swallowing the witch's voice, then swallowing her body within its cobalt sphere. Gouts of fire sprang up in the joists and floorboards where Ischade's web had touched them. Ischade covered her hair with her cloak as she inched away from the conflagration swirling around the globe. The Nisi witch was trapped, along with her accursed artifact; it was time to see that Straton was safely away from the house and its outbuildings. Straton-she put his face in the forefront of her mind and looked toward the comer where the stairs had been.
An orange nimbus surrounded the image Ischade formed of her lover. A demonic nimbus, she realized too late-after she had turned to face the throbbing cobalt sphere again. No wards, Roxane had screamed: no wards to keep Niko's demon at bay. It had one soul but it could claim many. Her foot scuffed against the rough planks, but Ischade moved forward as it beckoned.
"Straton."
Haught kept himself small and low against the roofbeams. Insignificant-as he had always been as a dancer or a slave; beneath the notice of witches and, certainly, of demons. He saw the thing which had been Roxane flickering between an awful emptiness and the dozen or more bodies the witch had taken during her life. He saw Ischade think to escape-and fail, and lurch inescapably forward. But mostly he saw the globe hanging midway between Ischade and the demon: motionless and, for the moment, ignored.
Still keeping himself invisible in the demon's perception, he drew himself into a compact crouch. There was no need for the globe to be destroyed by this, he thought while massaging the finger which bore Ischade's ring. One leap would take him across the sphere and down the stairs. He was a dancer still, in his body; the leap was no great feat for him.
He caught the skull-sized artifact on the tips of his fingers. The momentum of his leap brought the searing object hard against his breast as he forced the center of a very small universe to shift from one existence through an infinity of others. It clung to him; passed through him; absorbed him; shattered and expelled him utterly.
Ischade was hurled against the rafters by the force of the globe's destruction. Wrapped in the fullness of her fire-magic she barely reached the stairway when the roof itself was swallowed in the flames. Her robes were in flames before she reached the streets.
A tower of fire soared from the open roof of the Peres house to the heavens themselves. The demon, trapped in fire, warred with Stormbringer, whose thundercloud form was illuminated by each lightning-bolt He threw. A crowd was gathering, a crowd which saw her try to squeeze the flames from her hair and robes and called after her when she raced down the streets with fire still licking after her.